Newspaper Article

REGARDING MEDIA / TIM RUTTEN; Golden State in a golden age

Rutten, Tim

2002

Overview

Nothing before or since trumped the collaboration among publisher William Randolph Hearst -- a kind of multimedia Medici, really -- the architect Julia Morgan and the young engineer and builder George Loorz. Their work together on the so-called castle at San Simeon, at Wintoon (the Hearst family compound in Northern California), along the Grand Canyon and in Mexico is illuminated as never before in a remarkable new book, \"Building for Hearst and Morgan: Voices from the George Loorz Papers\" by the independent scholar and archivist Taylor Coffman. This is particularly true, Coffman said, in the letters she wrote to Loorz's children and in the correspondence Hearst, Morgan and their construction supervisor exchanged concerning the beauty of their Central Coast and Northern California sites. Morgan, in particular, wrote frequently to Hearst about San Simeon, saying, \"This is a gorgeous place and we have to do right by it.\" Opinions differ on whether or not they did. San Simeon -- or Hearst's Castle, as it is more frequently known -- is part pastiche, part historical collage, part act of recovery, part a work of extravagant imagination. Among its prime movers, Morgan was certainly the most enigmatic: She was, by turn, the only woman in her Berkeley class of 1894 to graduate with a degree in engineering, protegee to the great San Francisco architect Bernard Maybeck, the first woman ever to study architecture at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, the first woman licensed to practice architecture in California, and the designer of more than 800 buildings, who gave years of her life to the collaborations with Hearst.

• Publisher: Los Angeles Times Communications LLC
• Subject: Biographies / Books-titles / Chaffin, Tom / Fremont, John Charles (1813-90) / History / Pathfinder: John Charles Fremont and the Course of American Empire